Brett Graham
Māori artist Brett Graham subverts Victorian classicism and blends it with the sculptural traditions of his ancestors through poetic installations in a rich commentary on European colonisation. Representing Aotearoa/New Zealand at this year’s Venice Biennale, the Pacific is once again going to Europe.
Image credit: Brett Graham, O’Pioneer, 2020, wood and plaster, 300 x 400 (diam) cm, Installation view, TAI MOANA TAI TANGATA, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, NZ, 2020. Photo: Neil Pardington (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Ngāti Waewae). Courtesy the artist
The Māori concept wā is not the most straightforward thing to parse, not least because Māori don’t conceptualise it the same way Samoans and Tongans do teu le vā. Loosely, it’s a holistic, spatial, non-linear way of looking at time where past, present and future exist in a simultaneous ‘now’ navigated by whakapapa (genealogy/ancestry), oral tradition, natural cycles and bodily needs. It’s an important concept in order to understand the work of Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), easily one of the most important artists working in Aotearoa New Zealand today.
In his exhibition Tai Moana Tai Tangata, which began touring Aotearoa in 2020, Graham was very conscious of the many levels of the gallery in relation to wā.
“The many unusual vantage points,” he says, “allow for a compression of time, where the past, present and future collapse into one. The three films travel from the South Taranaki coast up to near where I live, the Manukau Harbour. They are the future, if we consume resources as suggested in settler’s letters from the 1840s. Objects that reference the past have a contemporary relevance and are conduits to the future.”
Graham’s striking installations are an ongoing critique of the histories of Western imperialism and an exploration of global Indigenous issues, viewed through the lens of Māori whakapapa spreading out as an even bigger net of Pacific/Moana Pasifika identity and Indigenous peoples around the world.
“Whakapapa is a very important part of Tai Moana Tai Tangata,” explains Graham. “In pre‑contact times, complex lines of descent ... Subscribe to read this article in full